In 2015, Massachusetts artist Mark Guglielmo took a two-week trip to Cuba. As the end of the day of his stay neared, he found himself unable to let go of the island.

"I had this realization that I had just experienced something life-altering," he said. "I had been at a point in my life where I was looking for new inspiration and I was just so blown away by Cuba, by Cubans, by the culture, by the music and by the warmth of the people."

Artist Mark Guglielmo points out the eyes he added to his piece "The Malecón; Havana, Cuba," as he talked about his work on June 1, which is on display at the Loveland Museum. (Jenny Sparks / Loveland Reporter-Herald)

Yet with so little time left, Guglielmo was unsure he had the ability or energy to do justice to what he saw. But when he found himself "in these peoples' homes listening to the best concert you've ever heard" on his last day, Guglielmo couldn't pass up documenting the moment.

Except there was one problem.

"I didn't bring a flash for my camera," he said. "And it was too dark, so I just thought, 'this is a lost moment.'"

Until he thought about his iPhone. He zoomed in and used the phone to capture the scene by taking hundreds of close-up shots from varying sides and angles.

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The real challenge, however, arrived when Guglielmo returned home and was left to determine how to arrange the shots into a cohesive piece. But a breakthrough came when he realized he could combine them into a large and unique collage, allowing multiple perspectives he shot to flow into one another.

That collage, and five others he created using that technique on two subsequent trips to Cuba, are on display at the Loveland Museum as a part of "Cuba In Transition," an exhibit Guglielmo said represents his attempt to transport the public to the Cuba that he came to know and love.

The murals, which span the vibrant and cosmopolitan cities of Havana and Santiago De Cuba, along with the more isolated and rural communities of Trinidad and Cinfuegos, capture Cuba's vibrant landscape, culture and the economic and political challenges.

Visible in a mural featuring shots taken along the Malecón — Havana's broad oceanfront esplanade — are several decaying buildings that appear to be on the verge of collapse, even as they are still inhabited.

"I put this here to kind of talk about how precarious it is to live in Cuba and in Havana," he said. "Something like 10 buildings a day collapse in Havana."

A detail of artist Mark Guglielmo's piece "The Sanchez Family at Home, Santiago de Cuba." (Jenny Sparks / Loveland Reporter-Herald)

Completing that mural also nearly stretched Guglielmo to his creative limits. His first attempt at arranging the 2,000 shots he along the Malecón left him so deflated that he cut the finished collage into five pieces and threw them into a closet for a month before getting back the courage to look at the piece again.

Guglielmo then realized he could make the piece work by arranging the pictures from an ocean perspective. The varying layers that make up the finished collage, which would not logically seem to fit together in the order Gugliemo has arranged them into, "work," he said, because they merge common elements that seem "to talk to and flow into each other such as the sky, water and roadway."

Guglielmo also extended this concept of challenging intuitive perspectives and assumptions to the subjects he shot. One collage depicts an elderly woman named NeNa whom he said would appear destitute to most Americans, but is actually "quite wealthy" and "at the center of her community."

Guglielmo also sought to capture the story of NeNa and his other subjects by recording them talking. Those recordings are played on a loop in the exhibition.

"I wanted the project to be visual but I also wanted people to be able hear their voices and their Spanish talking about their feelings and how they see the world," he said. "Every time I see some photographic thing done on Cuba by an American, it always seems to be from the tourists' eye and the Colonial mind, so I didn't want there to be anything between them. I wanted you, the viewer, to experience it how I did when I was there."

Artist Mark Guglielmo discusses his piece "The Malecón: Havana, Cuba," which is on display at the Loveland Museum. "Cuba in Transition, The Photo-Mosaics of Mark Guglielmo" exhibit opened in May at the museum. (Jenny Sparks / Loveland Reporter-Herald)